Influence isn’t being in a day, or a month. It takes time and effort. What makes things harder is that there’s no good way to measure influence, so it’s not easy to evaluate if you are even making progress.
But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying to become authority in your niche, because with authority comes visibility. Here are three steps to make your influence building strategy more complete and effective:
First: Clean Up Your Reputation
This is a crucial step to do before you ever start working on your social profile visibility. Why? Because negative reviews, social commentary and web pages tend to generate more views than the good, which means a search can bring it all up to the front page. That is the opposite of what you want. Think of this step as priming your search results for the best and brightest.
One great example of this problem comes from Subway, the long standing fast food sandwich maker. When their spokesperson, Jared Fogle of massive weight loss fame, was convinced of sexual crimes against children it was a horrifying thing. When it turned out that high up members of the Subway board may have known about the allegations for years and kept them quiet, it also became a massive scandal.
When you do a search for Subway you get their official pages. But you also get half a page of results, often ahead of the others, about Fogle and the alleged Subway conspiracy of silence. While it is unlikely that your own brand will have such shocking skeletons in the closet you can see the same principle in motion on a smaller scale with other companies. You don’t want to work on your social profile ranking only to have them overshadowed by angry former customers who left your service before a new version update worked out the kinks.
Now, Research Your Keywords
Ultimately, one of the biggest goals you are trying to achieve is establishing yourself as an authority on your given topic. If people know you are an expert, you are who they are going to turn to. Why would they choose amateur, or second hand, possibly incorrect knowledge when they could get it from an authoritative source?
Keyword research, once you have come up with the correct niche/niches to target, is perfect for helping to perpetuate your authority. Much of it comes down to SEO; if you are sprinkled all over the primary search results, you are going to be seen as the big name to follow when it comes to that niche. Related niches can also be targeted that way in order to branch out without casting your net too wide.
When you start out, don’t just publish content on your site. A popular marketing myth these days is that guest posting is dead. You can thank Google’s aggressive anti-GP rhetoric than that, but it actually backfired. People became angry and have continued posting on multiple blogs, because it works, and it is valuable. Plenty of blogs take guest submissions, so start looking for opportunities. This has the additional benefit of opening your audience pool into a wider ocean of possibilities.
Finally, Use Tools to Evaluate & Automate Your Progress
Klear calls itself a social intelligence platform, and they do deliver on that title. Their system is three step, and right there in the middle is influencer marketing. But unlike a lot of other tools, they are aimed more at community building through seeking out and engaging with that audience.
So it isn’t quite what you might be used to. You can combine it well with the competitor analysis, which will show you how others in your industry have been managing to build community.
One of your best weapons in your arsenal for content marketing is email. But creating a newsletter or drip campaign can be a serious pain, especially when so many platforms are so complicated, and make you manually set all of the sections.
But Mosaico helps with the actual email part. It is a template generator with simple drag and drop features. You can create one of two letter formats, each one fully branded and customized, and all of it is free. If you want to support open source programs, definitely try this one out.
Here we have the most complicated tool on the list. The good news is you don’t have to understand it to use it. From what I understand, it is a marketing platform that adapts based on “moments”, which is data like demographics and traffic gathered at any given time.
The strategy changes based on these packets of data, which offers you an ever evolving form of marketing that keeps ahead of trends instead of lags behind. This one is for the really serious ones with a decent budget.
Good luck building your influence!
All featured images are author owned! Guest article by Jessy Troy. Jessy Troy is social media enthusiast and digital editor with years of experience in online marketing..
